Dorothy Hood
August 27, 1918–October 28, 2000
The abstract paintings of Dorothy Hood are now recognized as masterpieces of twentieth-century American art. Their energy, scale, and ambition also reflect the spirit of Texas—Hood’s birthplace and home during the most productive period of her career.
Born in Bryan in 1918, Hood was raised in Houston, then moved east after high school to study art. While visiting Mexico in 1941, she made friends in the vibrant arts community and lived there on and off for twenty years. There, she developed her own distinctive style—geometrically abstract works that evoked the natural world, melding organic and artificial forms.
It was after Hood returned to Houston in the early sixties that she produced some of her most spectacular work. These towering ten-by-eight-foot paintings feature broad fields of modulated color with light surfacing from beneath. A sense of vast space and emptiness emanates from the canvases. In some, lightning bolts seem to crack through to an unknown beyond. Hood described these works as "landscapes of my psyche."
Hood died in 2000. While well regarded during her lifetime, she is now recognized as one of the most important American artists of her generation. About her home state, she once said, "The space of Texas and the plains and the sky and everything frees me. . . . You have every element for an artist there."
For More about Dorothy Hood
The Dorothy Hood Papers are held by the University of Houston Libraries Special Collections. The collection includes correspondence, written works including a memoir and poetry, scrapbooks, catalogs and other publicity, photographs, financial documents, artifacts, and other materials.
"I was sketching outer space before NASA started," Hood once said. While living in Houston, she visited NASA, befriended astronaut Alan Bean, and taught painting to astrophysicist Curt Michel. The influence of the Johnson Space Center and images produced by NASA can be seen in many of Hood’s works, such as Lunar Landscape (1968) and Extensor of the Sky (1970). A selection of these paintings are reproduced and discussed in Susie Kalil’s book The Color of Being/El Color Del Ser: Dorothy Hood, 1918–2000.
The Color of Life, a 1985 documentary about Hood, is available to stream on YouTube.
Hood’s scrapbooks and other papers documenting her career are held in the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.
Selected Bibliography
Gray, Lisa. "Life in the Abstract." Houston Press, December 21, 2000.
Kalil, Susie. The Color of Being/El Color Del Ser: Dorothy Hood, 1918–2000. Texas A&M University Press, 2016.
Vine, Katy. "Fame in the Abstract." Texas Monthly, September 2016.
Spanish Translation
Download the Spanish translation of this Texas Originals script.
Portrait of Dorothy Hood. Courtesy of the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi.
Zeus Weeps, 1972, oil on canvas, 88 1/4” x 115 1/4”, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of the Childe Hassam Fund of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1974. Photograph of Zeus Weeps by Rick Hall.